Reading over the general summary of WWI provided by Michael Howard, two particular details immediately stood out to me. The first, and I suspect this will be a recurring theme throughout the semester, was the horrific enormity of the war. I had a vague sense of the casualty figures incurred during specific battles throughout the war, but it was sobering to read the mortality totals for each campaign. It seems to me that many WWI generals bore responsibility for the human cost of this war on an unprecedented scale. Reading about how General Cadorna lost almost 1 million men "launching suicidal attacks in the mountains beyond the Isonzo", or how Haig's arrogance at the Somme cost the British 21,000 men in one day, really hammered home the impact each general could have on the forces they were responsible for.

     The second aspect of our reading which I found interesting was the civilian involvement in the war. The enthusiastic response to the war from the home front was something I had expected to find, but the degree to which civilian institutions stepped up to fill the gaps in governmental war preparations was suprising to me. I was under the impression that during the war, each government asserted nationalistic dominance over every part of civilian life; reading about initiatives of Walther Ratheneau or the Russian Zemstva introduced a new dynamic of civilian cooperation with the war that I was unfamiliar with. 

    I'll be interested to see how the literature we study over this course respond to these two conditions. Taken in tandem, these two factors -- the civilian cooperation with the government's wartime efforts, and the heavy costs incurred in human life by command incompetence -- suggests to me that post-WWI writers might harbor an anti-authoritarian streak, but that's just a guess.